Wikileaks suffered another distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack Tuesday morning, reports Fast Company. This attack was much more intense than Sunday's but still did not come close to actually shutting down the site.
A computer hacker known as “The Jester,” shocked officials when he claimed to be behind the cyber attack that disabled the WikiLeaks website Sunday morning, just before it released hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. embassy cables to the public.
The Jester, an ex-soldier justified his hacking by accusing the website of “attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, 'other assets' & foreign relations." The self-proclaimed “hacktivist for good” looked to the Web to continue combating terrorism and organizations that appear to back Islamic extremism after ending his military service.
Cyber security expert Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure told CNN he believed The Jester was, in fact, behind the attack.
WikiLeaks had already distributed the information to numerous sources, saying in a Twitter feed, “El Pais, Le Monde, Speigel, Guardian & NYT will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down.”
Though the WikiLeaks site was down for several hours Sunday, it was up and running Monday morning. Despite The Jester’s attempt to hinder WikiLeaks from distributing these classified documents, the site made its latest and largest leak shortly after the attack.